Elementary School

Village Glen Elementary is an innovative program serving K-6 students that promotes social and personal well-being and strong academic achievement through innovative and specialized instruction, provided within small structured classrooms. The teacher specialists at Village Glen are dynamic, highly-qualified teachers who hold California teaching credentials in Special Education, and the school follows the California State Framework and Content Standards, utilizing state adopted texts and curriculum.

Students receive direct, intensive instruction in reading, language arts, writing and math, differentiated to meet their individual needs. Interactive, hands-on lessons help develop their foundational academic skills and build on areas of strength while targeting remediation of needs. California State Content Standards are followed in each grade level in the core subject areas, including science and social studies.

Village Glen uses state-adopted Literacy programs, which provide a foundation for reading and language arts instruction by focusing on phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, grammar, and writing. Along with these skills, the school places an emphasis on reading comprehension and higher order thinking skills. Comprehension strategies are systematically and directly taught to help students develop the ability to make predictions, construct images, use prior knowledge, make inferences, ask questions, get clarification, and summarize. Through participatory, hands-on, small group activities, students also build their listening and speaking skills.

Along with the core reading curriculum, the Elementary program utilizes research-based intervention programs and supplementary programs to target students’ specific needs. These programs include Language!, Read Naturally, SRA Direct Instruction, SRA Language for Learning, Visualizing and Verbalizing, LiPS, Seeing Stars, and Junior Great Books. Village Glen also uses Step up to Writing and Handwriting without Tears for writing and handwriting skills. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in reading and help them learn to enjoy it as well.

Student math skills are built sequentially through an innovative curriculum that promotes hands-on practice, visual strategies, and technology. Students develop math fluency, calculation, reasoning, and problem solving skills while integrating and generalizing math concepts with real life applications. The progression includes basic number sense and numerical operations, fractions, decimals, percentages, geometry, and measurement, as well as data analysis with ratios, graphs, and equations.

At Village Glen, students are also taught strategies to assist them with executive functioning, organizational skills, and personal management from Kindergarten through 6th grade. The school also works to accommodate student needs through a variety of techniques and curriculum in order to foster independence and success within the school environment.